


one may call it a fall

by bee_bro



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Eye Gouging, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Jonah's Simp Club, M/M, Mention of - Freeform, Mordechai Big, Pining, cause theyre all falling to diff entities, except robert smirke gets to stay cool ;0, im talking about sad-bones bennett, mostly cause i didnt cross ref the timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:27:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24752386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bee_bro/pseuds/bee_bro
Summary: Where is the point between a human and an avatar? Matters not, as Jonah is convinced he'll never reach it.or: the process of jonah's avitarization as told in sleepless musings of a man deeply convinced in his own humanity
Relationships: + jonah's simp club is mostly here, Barnabas Bennett/Jonah Magnus, so there's flirting from mordechai and smirke
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45





	one may call it a fall

**Author's Note:**

> i had to vent from being Big Mad and got possessed by something to write this. kudos to the headcanons that say jonah's in-and-out dotted with eye-symbols along his organs.

There is a thin line between _avatar_ and _man_ , if any at all. There is an exhale’s distance between the ability to back out – the option to retract from the ever-alluring knowledge of _more, more,_ and live out the rest of one’s life, skirting the edges of ignorance. Because the less you know, the better you sleep.

And yet, it is much easier of a tumble – a fall, one might say – into the recesses of becoming that but a hound of the fear one so longs to understand. Jonah Magnus thinks, I will only learn, detached. I will only observe the fears and not interact with them or their continuities at all. And Jonah Magnus thinks this without understanding that the simple action of stepping away from a gruesome slaughter or a raging fire is – in itself – the simplest form of The Eye. That watching his friends fall away to the different grasps of what they approached so curiosity, is all Jonah’s own undoing in the Eye of a patient, docile yet infinitely dangerous Watcher.

Jonah thinks he has time.

Even before the insatiable hunger for immortality and his conquest to ride body to body, even before all that, Jonah thinks he has time. Human, human Jonah in his late twenties, thinks he has time to sit back and learn, to dig into the various Fears and to worm deep into the understanding of their mechanisms. And Jonah Magnus does not think he’s got anything to lose, not with a little wait, a little more delay on his part, a little more observation.

“You are a dangerous man,” Robert Smirke – rather fittingly, Jonah thinks – smirks from the stepladder he sits on, not the most stable of positions but one he’s donned often enough he knows how to execute safely.

“Oh, what gives?” Jonah smiles up at him, twirling tea in a cup, standing there in clean, well-pressed clothes. An odd sight to see at a half-built structure that is buzzing with the pleasant ambiance of polite construction work. Jonah thinks, they somehow know when not to make a ruckus. Their master is speaking. Robert leans his chin on a hand, he’s not young but he’s managed to age well, hair ashen and without a sign of balding.

“Watching people trip and fall without the intent of helping them up. Only to see how they handle it.” Robert shrugs, inconclusive.

“How is that dangerous, dear mine?”

“A man with too much understanding of another is always quite dangerous,” winks Smirke and goes back to his work, personally partaking in the careful, spiraling design of the brickwork.

What Jonah is, aside from dangerous, is _in danger._

Jonah watches Robert work a lot. The structures he makes… Are interesting. And Jonah also watches when Robert’s step ladder rests on a loose pebble, somehow unnoticed by the man who’d set it up. He doesn’t say anything, and waits, sipping yet another cup of tea, not leaning on any surface as he’s cautious of dust.

When Robert tips, it’s no surprise to Jonah, and he _watches_ , blissfully unaware of his own hypocrisy, dejectedly observing the tumble of a man who’d warned him about such habits.

Robert Smirke comes out of it fine. Only a scrape to his palms and a bruise to his side. He’s back on the ladder in minutes.

Jonah… with another pain in his lung. It’s sharp and makes him think of his late father, fallen to the prey of anomaly growths. And yet, no, what stings Jonah’s organs isn’t cancer or sickness familiar to any doctor. It is yet another etching of a simple yet deeply-engraved eye symbol upon the tissue. They open across his organs, little drawings of what he is slowly succumbing to. And he is unaware. What irony to be deeply seen and yet not see the gradual decay of one’s own humanity.

Now he has twenty-seven little eyes across his lungs, ribs, stomach. Eventually, he will have thousands. They will line his bones and his organs and they will be there when Jonah Magnus abandons his body and begins the trail of bloody tears that marks his century-long venture into pseudo-immortality.

Jonah is perhaps the first to know what path Mordechai is headed down. Maybe even before the man himself, Jonah sees the paling in his eyes and the whitening of his hair and, most tellingly, Mordechai stops replying to letters in typical, poetic fashion. He is a... Straightforward man but one with noble, looping handwriting and a peculiar personal quality to all his responses. Jonah sends him news of Smirke's and his own work, and Mordechai responds at first like he always does, engaging, mannered. The next letter, though, is a bit bleaker.

The next, too.

Eventually it is like writing to someone you do not know and Jonah momentarily entertains the thought that Mordechai has hired a penboy to reply to all his mail for some untoward reason. But not, it’s Lukas all right. When they meet next, he is damp as if from light rain, all over his shoulders and hair, and yet Jonah _knows_ there has been no precipitation in the forecast. _How does he know this?_ A hunch.

Lukas emerges smelling of ocean and looking like he’d walked through, what Jonah will one day understand to have been factual, heavy fog. Jonah can’t say it’s a bad look. The man is now sporting a fully white head of hair, coarse and on the verge of being wind-swept. Mordechai is cold and professional. Jonah is, by then, running on two nights of no sleep, caught up reading an ancient, impossibly lengthy collection of traveler stories, all a particular mountain ridge. So he doesn’t complain at all. Discussions of politics and Smirke’s work aside, the conversation is like talking to a dead man. And so they part on an equally professional note – or they almost do.

Jonah is oh so tired, manic almost, handling his lack of sleep well, yet slightly more unabashed than a standard night’s rest would’ve left him with. Before they part, Jonah offers Mordechai a hand, palm down towards the ground. It is a foolish gesture, asking for a goodbye kiss to the wrist, perhaps.

But for all its absurdity, it is the last time Jonah glimpses a humanity to Mordechai Lukas.

Mordechai’s eyes were once so blue and so expressive – and now, looking into impossibly crystal-shallow eyes of a man gone to the forces of isolation… Jonah catches the faintest resurgence of that same color, of before all this. There is the barest return of pink to Mordechai’s face, then, when he leans down and takes Jonah’s hand and kisses it, the pinnacle of manners. And yet his face breaks the mold of ice for that one second, that one gesture, and it’s like looking at the real Mordechai Lukas for one fleeting moment. 

It is a momentary step back into humanity, across the line, across that fucking _line._

When he leans back up from the chaste press of sea-salt dry lips, it’s gone. Mordechai is tall and cold and beautiful in his unavailability. He does not nod to Jonah, he does not say a word. He vanishes out of the room they’d occupied and when Jonah checks the hallway directly after his departure, there is no sign of the man. Only the cold, creeping residue of fog crawling along the floorboards.

The letters from Mordechai, after that, appear water-damaged. Soon, they turn completely and utterly illegible, ink sprawling across overly water-saturated paper. Jonah stops writing to him, as does Smirke, Barnabas, and the others. Jonah sits in his bed at night, gown white and laced at the collars with the thinnest strands of intricate pattern available on the market, fine silk interweaving like morning-lit spiderwebs. Jonah sits and reads through the letters from Mordechai that remain, the ones from before the … fears. The ones where he wrote with the boisterous attitude that tall, strong people sometimes inherit from their own physique.

He’d sat down to look through these to, firstly, ensure himself that Mordechai Lukas was indeed a real person. Whom he knew. And who knew him. And secondly, to… attempt and incite emotion? Jonah desperately needs to check, that yes, he is still human. That he can read these letters of a friend practically gone and feel remorse. Mourning.

He pretends he does, because that means he has still not crossed that line. Means he is still human and there is no deadline for him, that he has time to sit around and study and read and not think about the imminent approach of his own allegiance to something ancient and unfathomable. Of his own becoming. He clutches his aching rib and reads Mordechai’s words, _There is a beauty to this estate, so far out in the woods I can no longer hear the city. A relief, if I were to be honest. This is a place of peace, Jonah. Come visit._

Jonah never went. Why?

He sits in his bed and thinks, _Why did I not go?_

_Was it because I felt the way no such place would welcome visitors? Was I afraid to bring the city’s chatter and loud abrasive noise with me to a place he held so dear in its solitude?_

_Was it because I wanted to see… what would happen if I did nothing but watched?_

Barnabas Bennett is so daringly human, he is almost unbearable.

He is soft and young and joyful and there is a healthy color to his cheeks, ones that light up red when Jonah so much as spares him the vague attention of a lingering gaze. He dresses well, but only with the virtue of money, no sense of style or fashion present if his stylists weren’t adamant on keeping Barnabas presentable. If left to his own devices, the man would appear to social functions with his tie skewed or buttons done wrong…. Jonah barely goes with him anywhere due to this and… other more nuanced circumstances. Once Barnabas decided it be a good idea to hold Jonah’s hand at an auction for sculptures and, well, Jonah can’t have that.

Jonah can’t have an equally enflamed face, for all his features must be smooth and clean, there is no space for faltering emotion.

He thinks that for years.

And then he has to sit in his bed at night, reading old correspondence to check if this… muffling of his humanity had gone too far, perhaps, for the last time. Will his face burn at the words of Mordechai? At the memory of Barnabas? Will he feel what he once forbid himself from feeling?

 _No, no_ , no need for Barnabas to.. remain a memory. The pain in his rib lets up and Jonah straightens, lowering his hand from where he’d fruitlessly clutched at his chest in the afterthought of pain. He will meet Barnabas shortly. He needs to check. Needs to check if, at the touch of Barnabas’s soft, admittedly sweaty hands, he will once more feel plagued by hives of the softer, much more emotional variety. And if not… Jonah doesn’t think about that.

Because Jonah has time. Jonah is approaching thirty and he has time to study and learn and watch the completion of Smirke’s work and perhaps chase the leads that unclosed statements of the macabre leave. He has time, for he is human and full of the curiosity that kills cats left and right – but not him, he is convinced he will prevail and come out on top, still the same, still human. He has time.

Barnabas, as it turns out, is out of the country. Traveling somewhere again. Like that time lost and dehydrated in Egypt taught the poor fool nothing…. Jonah slinks around his rooms and resorts back to reading. It’s somehow another two days later that he closes the large tome, billowing a small exhale of dust, and realizes he has not moved or eaten or drank from when he’d sat down.

Jonah stands and feels… perfectly fine. Fed, even.

He does not think of this too much, and doesn’t think of the ache in his leg, at the bone, where another eye opens. Jonah sees himself in the mirror and what he sees is human, but that’s only what _he_ sees.

And Jonah knows perception is conditional.

Albrecht is free. The man has too much free time on his hands, that’s evident. He’s got a sprawling library to upkeep and yet, even in his earlier years, he is already carrying the mark of a wilting man. Jonah doesn’t know why they meet up, now, when there is something so deeply wrong on both accounts. And yet, if Jonah isn’t with someone, he needs to read, because what is time spent when he is not consuming, consuming, consuming words? Or the little gives to one’s personal life that can be found littered among their person. For example, the calluses on Albrecht’s finger are familiar. They are from countless sessions of writing. Jonah wonders what it is that Albrecht writes, and immediately realizes – through ways he cannot detail – that Albrecht has been rewriting ever book in his library by hand.

They don’t meet after that dinner. There is too much compassionate, knowing, pain in Albrecht’s eyes, as he too cradles his ribs. Jonah remains sternly straight-backed throughout the dinner. He cannot be seen the way Albrecht thinks he sees him. There is simply no way. Of course Albrecht is falling to the Eye. _If he is experiencing the same thing Jonah is… that would mean… no_. Jonah is like Smirke, unaffected.

He visits Smirke’s new creation and watches the man laugh with confusion when Jonah doesn’t get lost in the tunnels.

“You’ve learned my blueprints again, did you not, you old rat?” Smirke’s chuckle is all the same, years having only made it raspier. And yet at the corners of his eyes and in the rise of his eyebrows passes a split-second, yet deep, worry.

Jonah, who came into the building with zero knowledge of it whatsoever, smiles pleasantly and nods.

Barnabas is back in London and he replies to Jonah’s mail hastily and all at once, apologizing and waxing poetics about whatever the hell place he travelled to, and saying he’d been in London for weeks now but couldn’t bring himself to answer the built-up correspondence. Just couldn’t sit down and put words to paper or even touch a pen with the intent of communication. He apologizes for what feels like the hundredth time and they settle to meet for dinner once more, like nothing’s transpired.

Honestly, Barnabas is much the same. Bubbly, a bit sun-burnt (not sun-tanned, no, only red in an embarrassing badly contained way, which in the long run – Jonah supposes – will help him hide any blush). The place is badly lit in an intentional way, Jonah guesses, but all it does is obscure Barnabas, and in the candle-light of the table, Jonah swears that Barnabas is different. Older, maybe? Has he finally lost the soft slopes of a babe’s face, that haunted him well into even his late twenties? Has he gotten a different haircut? A new suit? No, no, cannot be… Jonah realizes he is not paying attention to the conversation, instead hungrily looking all over Barnabas, his eyes, his mouth, his delicate, pretty hands.

They speak of books and Barnabas tells of his travels once more and of how much of it was done solo. He then asks if he’d missed much, how are the rest doing? Jonah does his best to relay the vaguest retelling of the past few months, including a general warning against Mordechai Lukas and a tentative suggestion to not pick at Albrecht, for his health is bad. Barnabas nods, nods, drinks his white wine, and knocks his ankles against Jonah’s under the table once- like he used to when they’d dine together before-

And draws back with a quick, bashful apology.

This is… unexpected.

As their dessert is brought, Jonah attempts to once more touch their ankles under the table, and finds that Barnabas had drawn his legs so far under his chair, the motion is practically impossible. They split ways outside, and it smells like it’ll rain soon, air heavy with cold sea-side moisture even when they are no where near a bank.

Jonah, walking home, realizes that Barnabas had not smiled fully once, not the way he’d used to.

His eyes, too, had become almost gray with a regrettably familiar draining of color.

Jonah sends him another letter, reminding him to avoid contact with Mordechai at all feasible costs. Jonah stares at the postmark with… worry? Yes, yes, _worry._ He is worried for Barnabas, in a way, he is worried for dumb, young Barnabas. Except Jonah’s only a year older and they’d completed the academy in the same class and Barnabas, with his dumb tooth gap and endearing, soft smile that would undoubtedly make his eyes squint a little bit – his nice, warm brown eyes, yes, Barnabas, for all his travels and journal keeping in lieu of wanting to share his experiences and choosing to do it with paper and not with friends-

Barnabas is smart. Jonah has to admit.

Not in the best ways. He’d fall for scams and ill-meaning strangers in a heartbeat, but Jonah has seen Barnabas at the maths and at the sciences and he is good, and when he focuses, he is almost admirable.

Barnabas sends back a concise letter saying he’s off to Tibet now, and that he will most likely not reply for a few months to come. This is the second before last letter that Jonah ever receives from him.

The last letter from Barnabas will be delivered to the Magnus Institute only a year and a half later. A year and a half.

A lot can change in a year and a half.

But that’s not yet.

Now, Jonah receives the letter about traveling to Tibet and thinks about the feeling of Barnabas’s ankle and how it’d been freezing cold, clammy, too. He remembers Barnabas, freshly in the academy, hair a mess and shirt barely tucked in, grinning from ear to ear in the way that Jonah hated then and wants to hate now and can’t. Remembers being assigned the soft brown-eyed kid with so much compassion as his roommate and dreading every second he’d have to spend in closed quarters with Barnabas… Remembers how two years after they first kissed – almost on accident, that was, almost on accident but never really – he’d called Barnabas ‘Barry’ and had retied his tie again for the school ceremony, because after all the years of boarding school, Barry still hadn’t learned to do his clothes properly.

Remembers going their separate ways after graduating and being thrown around different ends of life for a few months before coming together again, within the next half a decade tacked on with Robert Smirke, Mordechai Lukas, Albrecht von Closen, the rest…

Jonah Magnus sits at his desk, looking at the letter – barely a paragraph – on Barry’s departure. This incites… something. This makes his bones stop hurting for a few days. This makes him hungry for fried eggs in the morning, real, cooked food. Makes him sleepy at the end of a day. A dip back into human normalcy.

A balance right above the god-damned line.

And the death of Albrecht tilts it.

The autopsy brings insight to… Albrecht’s pains. Eyes, so many eyes, Fanshawe tells him, _so many eyes._

Jonah contemplates this with cynical, scalpel-like peculiarity that’s been left in the absence of mourning. And dejectedly, almost with a great relief, _Knows_ that Fanshawe only sounds outraged at the number of eyes within Albrecht because he hasn’t seen the amount etched into _Jonah_ , throughout.

Jonah has if not five times more.

This realization shakes loose the single brick that brings the tower of Babel down. Jonah slides to the floor. He’d just been reading letters, and before that, yet another statement, yes, he’d been feeding, isn’t that right? Smirke’s laugh almost echoes within the walls, ones he’d helped build, _You are a dangerous man…_

No, Jonah thinks, I am no longer man, am I?

There is anger.

Jonah destroys the office. But not the statements. His rage, somehow, unconsciously, completely and utterly bypasses the slew of papers. The damage is taken by his chair and the corners of his desk, and finally he flings a paperweight in a random direction which happens to be the mirror.

The grand thing comes crashing down, shards the size of his palm webbing out across the floor in a smatter of evidence that there are things that no time will mend, a broken mirror is a broken mirror and will never reflect something right again.

Jonah catches sight of himself in one of the shards, and it is hypnotizing.

He stands in his office, breathing heavy and fast, eyes unblinking, hurting as they dry, staring at himself in the piece of mirror, and there is a familiar, slow and meticulous pain of what he now knows is an eye opening, scratched across his very chest where Jonah knows lies a beating heart.

Such an inherently human characteristic sullied by what he’d on accident- almost on accident, that was, almost on accident but never really – succumbed to becoming the avatar of. He is transfixed.

Months later, and it has been a year and a half since he’s heard from Barnabas Bennett.

He receives a letter straight to his desk.

It is rumpled, curved at the edges where water had gotten its unfixable hold of the parchment. Stained with grime. He _Knows_ whom it is from.

He Watches the sender succumb.

The Lonely had taken Mordechai and cloaked him, made him a part of its wretched whole. But it had taken Barry – hm, no, Barnabas Bennett - and it had chewed him through and spit out his bones like he was nothing but the remnants of his corporeal form.

The walk into the Lonely is one of … sadness. Yes, sadness. And it is a mild kind of sadness, a general understanding that something that has been there forever is gone. But there is no self-chastising for reading the letter and… leaving it at that. Because what was Jonah to do? Don a white hero’s cape and tread into the mist to rescue someone who had been tainted by the Lonely for… Well, since Egypt? How do you rescue an avatar from its enigmatic core? Like rescuing a fish from drowning. Barnabas Bennett was just too unlucky to get chucked into the Great Alone instead of assimilating into it on his own, something he was on his sure way to doing. If Jonah were to judge by his eyes, his hands, his smile or lack of one, his hair… Given maybe another year, Barnabas could have become a patron of the Lonely himself, falling into it much like Mordechai did in his time.

But no, he had to go and make trouble with the Lukases.

Mordechai lets Jonah into the Lonely in peace, eyes tired and heavy, gaze focused on Jonah’s hand, the one he’d once kissed, observing in mild confusion as if he can’t remember ever having a reason to do so.

He lets Jonah into the mist and then out. Barnabas Bennett is yes another lost to the study of it all… Jonah holds his skull, clean, clean clean white bone. Whiter than a normal skeleton should be, smoother too. Polished like a cleaning of one’s features. Stripping Barnabas Bennett down into a final, infinite sort of loneliness.

How do you rescue an avatar from its entity? Jonah digs out his first pair of eyes and does not know. For, after all, he was never able to rescue himself.

When was the point he crossed the line?

Was it when he left Barnabas Bennett to cry out the last of his tears in a place that stunk of memories you sure you knew but couldn’t quite place?

Was it when he knew the way Mordechai was headed and wanted to check his hypothesis by simply remaining on the sidelines and letting the tragedy overtake the man?

Was it when he vigilantly stared at the pebble under the stepladder?

When he ignored the first sting of an eye insignia opening on the flat bone surface of his ribs?

Was it when he realized that people usually closed their eyes when kissing and didn’t leave them open? When Barry complained about it? Was it then, when he would pretend to close them only to remain watching after Barry thought it safe to close his own?

Was it in the academy? When he’d watched an affair happen between a teacher and student? Was it when he didn’t report it to the principle, but instead slipped the professor notes, driving the man to paranoia about being constantly observed by someone who _knew?_

When he was barely a teen and stalked someone, high out of their mind on cocaine, through the streets for days just to… See?

Or was it when he was eight? And watched a bunch of older kids fool around and shove another child into a well? Surely they didn’t mean it. An accident. The child could’ve been saved, yes, if someone had called for help when they’d seen the incident unfold. Someone like Jonah, who stood hidden in some bushes, frozen still and wide-eyed. He never said a thing. Only watched. Was it then?

Jonah thought he was safe because he _only_ _watched_. All his life. 

Was there ever even a line?

**Author's Note:**

> hmu w some comments babes or go give me a vibe check on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/22ratonthestreet) tbh r.i.p. Barnabas you were a good simp 


End file.
